LEGO Architecture celebrates the past, present and future of architecture through the medium of the LEGO Brick. Whether it's Buckingham Palace, The Burj Khalifa or New York City the Lego Architecture range has something for everyone. LEGO Architecture United States Capitol Building 21030 LEGO Architecture Buckingham Palace 21029 LEGO Architecture Venice 21026 LEGO Architecture New York City 21028 LEGO Architecture Studio V110 21050 Box Set LEGO Architecture Louvre 21024 Box Set LEGO Architecture Berlin 21027 LEGO Architecture The Eiffel Tower 21019 Box Set LEGO Architecture Flatiron Building 21023 LEGO Architecture London 21034 LEGO Architecture Burj Khalifa 21031 LEGO Architecture Chicago 21033 LEGO Architecture Sydney 21032Lego bricks do not come cheap. Just ask Zhao, the Chinese artist whose Lego sculpture worth $15,000 fell victim to the clumsiness of a small child at a Lego Expo on Sunday. The sculpture, a brick version of Nick from the animated film Zootopia, fell to pieces within an hour of the exhibit's opening.
SEE ALSO: Sneakers made of only legos are perfect for playtime and game time On the bright side, $15,000 worth of Lego bricks are worth the same amount whether they're assembled or dissembled. And though that number may seem high, it's not particularly surprising considering the prices of retired Lego sets that fetch much more than their original retail prices. This is some seriously pricey plastic. Wildly Expensive Lego SetsThe page was not foundAfter over 60 years of firing up children’s imaginations and causing excruciating pain to their parents’ bare feet, Lego is growing up. Just launched in the UK, the Lego Architecture Studio is the Danish toy company’s attempt to get serious about the true potential of its plastic building blocks. The click-together bricks have long been cited as a source of inspiration for budding architects and the brand is now keen to monetise this association. Adult fans of Lego (or afols for short) are clearly a lucrative market and the toy firm has previously sought to cash in on this ever-expanding demographic with its boutiquey range of famous buildings.
Designed more for mantelpieces and office shelves than imaginative playscapes, they range from Frank Lloyd Wright’s conveniently blocky Fallingwater to the arcing sails of the Sydney Opera House – which is formed almost entirely of bespoke components that can only be used in one way, taking most of the fun out of building it. The Architecture Studio promises something entirely different. It is the first Lego set that comes without instructions, providing 1,200 bricks and a 250-page manual for inspiration, featuring contributions from a number of high-profile architects, all extolling the virtues of using Lego in their creative process. With a hefty price tag of £150, the kit is designed to “allow you to explore the ideas and principles of architecture”. The jumbled, hastily edited book takes a scattergun approach to such ideas as scale and mass, surface and section, modules and repetition, illustrated with what the practices themselves have made out of Lego. So is it a mine of creative possibility – or an overpriced desk toy?
I decided to put it to the test by inviting a group of architect friends over for a playday. On opening the box, the first sign of seriousness is that colour has been banished. All the pieces are white, with some transparent elements, presumably to shed the childhood associations and make it more like something architects would use. Nor are there any little yellow people (or “minifigs”), as their fixed scale of 1:48 would limit construction to that ratio; whereas a Lego brick, as the manual reminds us, could be a single brick, an entire floor, or a whole block in a sprawling field of towers. With 76 different types of Lego bricks scattered across the table, from flat baseplates to chamfered wedge-shaped blocks and lots of tiny pieces with nipples and sockets sprouting in all directions, the challenge was to know where to begin. Our first-year tutor, when we all met at architecture school over a decade ago, used to tell us to use “thinking hands” whenever we were stuck for inspiration.
The idea was that, by suspending your critical faculties and letting your hands simply roam free, you might fashion something unexpected from odds and ends between your fingers – just as Frank Gehry summons his galleries and opera houses from crumpled scraps taken out of the bin. So we began clicking and snapping, to see where our thinking hands would take us, as the mood shifted from carefree play to competitive panic, with the thought that someone else might take all the corner pieces you needed before you’d completed your Mayan ziggurat of doom. One friend seized all the transparent blocks and constructed a slender, glazed facade from which an elegant spiral staircase sprouted in a precipitous twirl. Another took all the chunky standard bricks and began stacking them up in stepped levels to form what looked like an Indian stepwell, before realising there weren’t enough normal bricks to achieve his plan. Another, determined to prove that Lego can act in tension as well as compression, assembled a refined suspension bridge from the spindliest of components.
I, meanwhile, found myself stacking up a tower of ever-fatter floors, accidentally making the menacing HQ of an evil empire, a top-heavy monster building that would put the Walkie-Talkie to shame. Somehow, everything we produced had a decidedly 1970s feel, a look formed by both the number of chamfered blocks in the set, and the inescapable desire to make everything symmetrical as you stack floor upon floor. Details are added, and bits extended with impossible cantilevers, until you realise the table is full of things that recall the megastructures of the Japanese metabolist movement crossed with the autocratic monuments of Pyongyang. Or maybe that was just us. In the end, we cut our losses and piled everything up into one gigantic totem pole, sprouting helipads and dripping with skygardens in a way the oligarchs of Knightsbridge could only dream of. None of which, we concluded, would we have come up with without the Lego. But nor did it feel like it encouraged any architectural investigation – just an exploration of form, at a particular scale encouraged by the proportions of the blocks, there being an inclination to build at what you generally think of as Lego scale.